17 Fun Facts about the illustration

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1. I was 27 when I did this illustration.

2. It took roughly 400 hours to research, draw, and paint.

3. The underlying black and white illustration was done in Freehand on a Mac 8100 in 1995. Freehand is no longer a product as it was purchased by Adobe and shelved (it competed with their Illustrator product.)

4. I took over 300 photographs for reference. I had to go to various car shops and consult multiple maintenance manuals to get engine details.

5. I painted the illustration by hand using Adobe Photoshop 3.0 using a Wacom tablet. No 3D was involved.

6. To the best of my knowledge, this was the first cutaway illustration of this scale ever painted digitally.

7. Because the image was so large (300 mb), I had to paint it in small pieces. This was possible because Photoshop had a feature to isolate a small section as a separate file. I could paint it in layers and Photoshop would insert the modification back into the original.

8. Originally, I wanted to paint it with a airbrush. Unfortunately, that skillset takes years to master and at the time digital seemed to be the right direction.

9. I never liked the car being red and mono-colored. But it was the color the car club chose.

10. I had to buy a $1600 1gb hard drive to hold the illustration. Very expensive. Now days, you can get the same capacity from a USB thumb drive for about $5.

11. I had to paint it at a higher resolution than was required for print. In the end, I reduced it down to 136mb.

12. At the time, there was no general internet to send digital images through. I had to store it on a portable drive. There was only one drive available: Iomega Bournelli 230mb drive. It was a amazing I ever got it printed in the first place.

13. A few years later, the drive that had the illustration failed. I don't have access to the original illustration files. I sometimes cry about this. ;)

14. At one point, a company called OSP approached me abot rights to reproduce this illustration. I gave them the rights and for three months, I got royalties from sales. Suddenly, they disappeared. They were sold off to another company that is still selling their version of the poster and I've never seen a dime of royalties since.

15. If you look up Cutaway '57 Chevy, you will see another poster floating around with my illustration. I'm still bitter.

16. I paid Chevrolet $500 for rights to make 3000 copies of this print. To date, I've sold, given away, or threw away about 800 copies. I have the rest in their original packaging under my stairs.

17. When I moved from Logan, Utah in 1996, I moved to Roy, Utah. By sheer coincidence, the winner of the car was my neighbor! So I'd see the car from time to time in my neighbors driveway. I can't remember his first name (maybe Steve), but his last name was Brown. He offered to take me for a ride in the car several times. Being an introvert, I kept telling him I was busy and never took him up on the offer.